VISTA: User-centered VR Training System for Effectively Deriving Characteristics of People with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Pervasive symptoms of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), such as a lack of social and communication skills, are major challenges to be embraced in the workplace. Although much research has proposed VR training programs, their effectiveness is somewhat unclear, since they provide limited, one-sided interactions through fixed scenarios or do not sufficiently reflect the characteristics of people with ASD (e.g., preference for predictable interfaces, sensory issues). In this paper, we present VISTA, a VR-based interactive social skill training system for people with ASD. We ran a user study with 10 people with ASD and 10 neurotypical people to evaluate user experience in VR training and to examine the characteristics of people with ASD based on their physical responses generated by sensor data. The results showed that ASD participants were highly engaged with VISTA and improved self-efficacy after experiencing VISTA. The two groups showed significant differences in sensor signals as the task complexity increased, which demonstrates the importance of considering task complexity in eliciting the characteristics of people with ASD in VR training. Our findings not only extend findings (e.g., low ROI ratio, EDA increase) in previous studies but also provide new insights (e.g., high utterance rate, large variation of pupil diameter), broadening our quantitative understanding of people with ASD.